Based on newly-discovered, secret documents from German archives, diaries and newspapers of the time, Gun Control in the Third Reich presents the definitive, yet hidden history of how the Nazi regime made use of gun control to disarm and repress its enemies and consolidate power. The countless books on the Third Reich and the Holocaust fail even to mention the laws restricting firearms ownership, which rendered political opponents and Jews defenseless. A skeptic could surmise that a better-armed populace might have made no difference, but the National Socialist regime certainly did not think so—it ruthlessly suppressed firearm ownership by disfavored groups.
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A year before Adolf Hitler took power in 1933, the German Interior Minister directed that gun registration records be made secure to keep them from falling “into the hands of radical elements.” His efforts proved futile: the records fell into the hands of the Nazi government, which used them to disarm its political enemies and the Jews. By 1938, the Nazis had deprived Jews of the rights of citizenship and were ratcheting up measures to strip them of their assets—including the means to defend themselves. The horrific consequences have names etched in our consciousness: “The Night of Broken Glass” (Kristallnacht) and the Holocaust.

Countless books have been written about Hitler’s dictatorship yet have failed to mention the disarming of Jews and other “enemies of the state.” Independent Institute Research Fellow and author Stephen P. Halbrook now fills this gaping void with his pioneering and eye-opening book, Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and “Enemies of the State.”

Based on newly discovered documents from German archives, diaries, and newspapers of the time, Halbrook presents the hidden history —in a readable but well documented, scholarly manner—of how the Third Reich made use of gun control to disarm and repress its enemies and consolidate its power.

The book covers the historical periods of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich leading up to World War II. The book then presents a panorama of pertinent events during World War II regarding the effects of the disarming policies. As Americans’ right to bear arms becomes increasingly challenged, it is a caution to all who debate these issues.

“Stephen Halbrook’s meticulous research in Gun Control in the Third Reich sheds new and revealing light on the consolidation of Nazi power and the prosecution of the Holocaust. Everyone, including advocates of gun controls, should find this pioneering and thought-provoking book essential reading.”
—James B. Jacobs, Warren E. Burger Professor of Law, New York University; author, Can Gun Control Work?

“Gun Control in the Third Reich, Stephen Halbrook’s excellent history of gun control in Germany, shows that, motives notwithstanding, removing weapons from the general population always disarms society vis a vis its worst elements. In Germany the authorities tried to deal with the Nazi and Communist mobs that were shaking society’s foundations indirectly, by disarming ordinary people. But their cowardice ended up delivering a helpless population to the Nazis’ tender mercies. Halbrook’s richly documented history leads Americans to ask why those among us who decry violence in our society choose to try tightening the vise on ordinary citizens’ capacity to defend themselves rather than to constrain the sectors of society most responsible for the violence.”
—Angelo M. Codevilla, Professor Emeritus of International Relations, Boston University; author, Informing Statecraft, War: Ends and Means (with Paul Seabury), The Character of Nations, and Between the Alps and a Hard Place: Switzerland in World War II and the Rewriting of History

“Gun Control in the Third Reich is a provocative book on what is surely the ‘worst case scenario’ in the history of gun control and an illuminating meditation on the role that the disarming of the Jews played in the Holocaust.”
—Jonathan Kirsch, author, The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan

“What good would private arms do against a totalitarian state? That won’t remain an unanswerable rhetorical challenge for readers of Stephen Halbrook’s calm, detailed scholarly book, Gun Control in the Third Reich. As Halbrook shows, Nazi leaders went to great lengths to extend the gun control laws they inherited from the Weimar Republic. They were obsessed with disarming Jews and other designated public enemies. Potential resistance was not only physically disabled. It was morally and psychologically disarmed. Evil then became irresistible in Germany, not because it was fueled by fanaticism but because shielded by fatalism.”
—Jeremy A. Rabkin,
Professor of Law,
George Mason University School of Law

“Even a defense with small arms against a tyrannical regime, if known, can galvanize public opinion which is the ultimate source of all political authority. That is why, as Halbrook authoritatively shows in Gun Control in the Third Reich, the Nazis—despite their massive military force—went out of their way to confiscate even small caliber weapons in Germany.”
—Donald W. Livingston, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Emory University

“‘The devil is in the details’ as the British note. Stephen Halbrook’s excellent and deeply researched book, Gun Control in the Third Reich, has revealed the anticipation of Nazi gun control techniques in Weimar attempts to control incipient civil war between Nazis and Communists. In a conservative country replete with WWI veterans, racked with unemployment and wrecked with ideological struggles among the extreme Left, the list of potential victims proliferated among whom unarmed Jews had top priority. They had been quickly disarmed by the Nazis using Weimar laws. Only armed peasants and urban refugees in the mountains and forests in the perimeters of the Reich could resist the Nazi juggernaut until saved by Allied armies. History does indeed provide important lessons for contemporary debates and Halbrook’s important research should inform our contemporary debate on gun control.”
—Steven B. Bowman, Professor of Judaic Studies, University of Cincinnati; Miles Lerner Fellow, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; whose books include Jewish Resistance in Wartime Greece, The Holocaust in Salonika, The Agony of Greek Jews 1940-1945, and The Straits of Hell: The Chronicle of a Salonikan Jew in the Nazi Extermination Camps Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Melk, Ebensee

“For Jews left trembling in their homes, powerless to defend against Nazi Stormtroopers, the right to possess a gun took on special meaning in the 1940’s. In Stephen Halbrook’s extraordinary book, Gun Control in the Third Reich, the consequence of disarming a population making them vulnerable to imprisonment and annihilation is told with frightening detail. It is a history with poignancy. With gun controllers in our midst today, who either do not understand the Second Amendment or choose to redefine it for their own ends, it would serve them well to read and digest the powerful arguments in this pathbreaking book.”
—Herbert I. London, President, London Center for Policy Research; former President, Hudson Institute

“With Gun Control in the Third Reich, Stephen Halbrook has written an important and disturbing book. It provides a timely reminder that self defense and the right to bear arms are fundamental human rights.”
—Robert J. Cottrol, Professor of Law, History, and Sociology and Harold Paul Green Research Professor of Law, George Washington University

“One need not agree with Stephen Halbrook’s opposition to almost all forms of firearms control in order to find Gun Control in the Third Reich, his book on regulation of firearms in post-World War I and Nazi Germany, both illuminating and challenging. The most truly serious arguments against significant regulation of firearms have always involved critiquing the proposition that a potentially oppressive state should have a monopoly over the means of violence, and Halbrook’s book very much contributes to that debate. Many no doubt would like to believe that Nazi Germany is sui generis, which, paradoxically, implies that there is not much to be learned from its specific history or policies with regard to our own dilemmas today. Others are less optimistic, and for them Halbrook’s well-told narrative has implications for our contemporary debates.”
—Sanford V. Levinson, W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair, University of Texas School of Law; author, Framed: America’s 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance

“In Gun Control in the Third Reich, Stephen P. Halbrook gives a decisive historical answer to a question which has generally been discussed without much evidence in the political discourse of recent years. Now there is no doubt: Halbrook shows that the Nazis relied on gun control to carry out its totalitarian program. Indeed, by means of painstaking historical research, he shows that the weapon confiscations and punishments of the Third Reich relied very much on the earlier registration measures of the democratic Weimar Republic. This pioneering book tells an essential story that is central to the history of the modern Leviathan state. Highly recommended!”
—L. Hunt Tooley, Professor of History, Austen College; whose books include Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe, Battleground and Home Front in the First World War, and National Identity and Weimar Germany

“Discussions of Nazi gun control efforts are a staple of American debate, but until now there was little authoritative in-depth research to draw on. Stephen Halbrook’s extensive research and clear explication in his book Gun Control in the Third Reich ensures that future discussion will be much better informed. A must-read for anyone interested in this subject.”
—Glenn H. Reynolds, Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Tennessee

“In Gun Control in the Third Reich, Stephen Halbrook has uncovered and thoroughly documented a long-overlooked aspect of Hitler’s rise to Power and ultimate genocide of German Jews—the disarming of the citizenry made possible by gun registration and confiscation laws adopted during the Weimar Republic. The parallels to today’s gun control debates in the United States are bone-chilling, and ought to raise a red flag call to action for all freedom-loving Americans.”
—John C. Eastman, Henry Salvatori Professor of Law and Community Service, Chapman University; Founding Director, Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence

“Stephan Halbrook’s Gun Control in the Third Reich provides a stark example of why defenders of liberty must oppose any attempts to limit our ability to defend ourselves from private and public criminals. Halbrook’s work is especially timely since so many in Washington are once again trying to convince the people they have nothing to fear from gun registration and other infringements on our Second Amendment rights.”
—Ron Paul, former U.S. Congressman and candidate for President of the United States

“Steeped in rich detail, exactingly researched, and supported by newly discovered documents, Gun Control in the Third Reich is a compelling work that no one who is serious about the gun control debate in America can ignore. Stephen P. Halbrook has produced a seminal piece of scholarship that describes how the gun control policies of the liberal Weimar Republic were molded into Hitler’s strategy to disarm both the Jews and his political opponents.”
—Abraham H. Miller, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Cincinnati

“Gun Control in the Third Reich, Stephen Halbrook’s extensively documented account of gun control under Nazi Germany, shows how gun control was used to keep guns out of the ‘wrong’ hands, mainly Jews. Much of the discussion these days regarding registration focuses on the claimed ability to trace crime guns. There might be no evidence of registration’s success in doing that, but Halbrook slams home the success that registration had in tracing the guns of law-abiding politically undesirable citizens, so-called ‘enemies of the people.’ Americans in even modern cities such as New York can see how discretionary licensing on who can own guns keeps blacks from owning guns, but Germany paints a picture of how discretion was used to disarm Jews and others considered undesirable. Among the many chilling discussions is how German Jews were systematically disarmed just weeks before the Night of the Broken Glass (Reichskristallnacht). Ultimately, however, just as Americans have recently learned about their IRS tax records, Halbrook shows that no one can really guarantee promises that information on gun registration will never be abused.”
—John R. Lott, Jr., author, More Guns, Less Crime; President, Crime Prevention Research Center

“In Gun Control in the Third Reich, Halbrook is particularly effective in showing how the path for Nazi totalitarianism was cleared, though inadvertently, by firearms laws of Weimar Germany. The political objective of those laws was to enhance the public welfare by diminishing the ability of the population to inflict violence on each other. What followed instead was something not foreseen by the principled, well-intending Weimar democrats who carried that policy into execution. Those laws—heavily laden with official discretion—left disfavored minorities perfectly helpless when Hitler and the Nazi government came to power. Halbrook’s book is the most complete depiction of a story that is interesting in itself, and which has lessons for our own place and time.”
—Daniel D. Polsby, Dean and Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law, George Mason University School of Law

“Stephen Halbrook, a renowned expert on the subject, systematically and brilliantly examines Nazi gun-control policy in Gun Control in the Third Reich. American advocates of banning guns have tried to downplay the Nazi example because stringent control preceded the Nazis. But the fact remains that the Nazis capitalized on the fact that neither the Jews nor other victims nor the Germans in general, as well as those people in the occupied countries, could resist the Holocaust because the Nazi government had all the guns.”
—Don B. Kates, Jr., author, Armed: New Perspectives on Gun Control and The Great American Gun Debate (with Gary Kleck)

“The fascinating book Gun Control in the Third Reich deals with firearms regulation in Germany from the beginning of the Weimar Republic in the early 1920s, when guns began to be heavily regulated, through the early days of World War II when gun ownership was punishable by death, through the Third Reich in 1945 when the government began to allow Germans access to weapons to fend off the Russian invaders. . . . Professor Halbrook does not claim that Hitler and the Holocaust would not have occurred had the population of Germany been armed. Nonetheless, firearms in the possession of individuals, especially Jews after they were ghettoized, might have raised the costs to the Nazis and slowed them down.”
—William A. Schroeder, Professor of Law, Southern Illinois University

“Gun Control in the Third Reich is Stephen Halbrook’s best book. He shows how the destruction of gun ownership, gun clubs, and self-defense was part of the National Socialists’ extermination of civil society, individualism, and the Rule of Law.”
—David B. Kopel, Adjunct Professor of Advanced Constitutional Law, Denver University Sturm College of Law; author, Guns: Who Should Have Them?; Research Director, Independence Institute